Week beginning 5th May 2025
Life cycles, bugs and VE Day celebrations.
This week we continued to explore lifecycles deep diving into the lifecycle of the frog, thinking about the enormous changes it goes through from frogspawn right up to becoming a fully grown frog. The children began to notice the minibeasts in the garden and a particular favourite the ladybirds, so we had some ladybird themed activities to help us with our fine motor, counting and early subitising skills. we also made some stained glass dragonflies with colourful cellophane which when held in the sunlight projected a colourful shadow, this proved very popular. As we were looking at minibeasts we made some bug houses for the children to hand in their own gardens.
80th Anniversary of VE Day.
Today at playgroup we celebrated the 80th anniversary of VE Day in memory of all of those who fought for our freedom.
We had lots of lovely activities on offer as well as having a special street party style snack!
It’s so important to talk to our children about events like this, in an age appropriate way to help them to connect with the past and promote gratitude and remembrance as well as a historical understanding of significant events in our history.
It was lovely to watch the children embrace the activities with curiosity and energy
Week beginning 12th May 2025
Sun awareness, more minibeasts and pursuing children’s interests.
This week we spent time thinking about how to keep safe in the sun, encouraging the use of sun cream, hats and wearing loose clothing. The children made UV detection bracelets, using special colour changing beads, which meant that they could easily see the effect that UV rays have even on quite overcast days. this helped to keep us all safe as we enjoyed the sunshine and lots of water play, including bathing the playgroup dolls…. another firm favourite this year!
We also continued our minibeast exploration as the children has become quite intrigued by the variety of minibeasts in our garden. the minibeast tuff tray and creating our own bugs using leaves were very popular.
And finally we began making our costumes for Feast day…… I wonder what we need black carboard tubes for…. why not come back soon and see what we made them into.
Week beginning 19th May 2025
Planning - Staff Peer Review Week.
Effective planning can be quite time consuming, ensuring we are capturing all of our children’s needs, interests and their levels of development as well as including in the moment planning based on children’s experiences and comments. So with this in mind we thought it would be good if we challenged each other to individually do the planning for a day. Each staff member chose a theme, interest, or area of learning and planned activities to support the children’s development. Everything required for their day had to be sources, prepared and organised by the individual. We then reviewed each other and ourselves looking at what went well, what could be improved, whether we met learning objectives and overall engagement of the children. It was great to reflect not only on ourselves, but also each other and the realisation that well rounded planning is so much easier with everyone’s ideas and input.
This week we learnt about:
Healthy eating and making good choices planned by Kate
Bees, how they help us and developing our fine motor and shape recognition skills (World Bee Day) planned by Fiona
A Planet/space themed day - following children’s interests/developing fine motor and scissor skills planned by Becca
All about pigs - developing our creative (EAD) and number skills planned by Lizzy
Turtles - learning all about turtles, their habitat and the importance of protecting them and their environment (World Turtle Day) planned by Sarah
We hope you enjoy looking at what we got up to this week.
